Gleanings

Hedy Lamarr (image source)

Steven Nadler reviews a book on Spinoza and Maimonides.

'Anyone who enjoys the company of a provocative intelligence will want to pick up Night Music, a challenging collection of scattered Adorno essays. And pick a fight with it.'

Boyd Tonkin reviews Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind.

Cyril Connolly's '100 Key Books of the Modern Movement'

From the Guardian in 2002: '"We love only once," Connolly wrote, "and on how that first great love affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives." "Nonsense," Waugh mocked in the margin.'

Since kickstarting his career with his acclaimed travel bestseller, In Xanadu, at the age of 22, [William] Dalrymple has kept to writing about India and the Middle East consistently for 25 years. "Religion is a constant," he happily admits. "It seems to be something I can't quite escape."'

"On a steep slope overlooking Brno stands a modernist architectural masterpiece: the Tugendhat House. It is this remarkable building that provided Simon Mawer with inspiration for his most recent novel, The Glass Room."

More about Brno (which was the birthplace not only of Kundera but also of Kurt Godel, Adolf Loos, Erich Korngold, Pavel Tichy and Lorenz Eitner and in the environs of which were born Gregor Mendel, Ernst Weiss and Maurice Strakosch, AND which was the childhood home of Robert Musil) -- it has given Milan Kundera honorary citizenship.

David Sexton reviews The Letters of T. S. Eliot, and Josephine Hart reviews his tragic first marriage.

Amos Oz interviewed: “It's always a living miracle when I meet a reader. A reader is a co-producer of a book. I write the musical score, he plays it."

Footage of a John Nash interview.

Largehearted Boy and Fimoculous track the 'books of the year' lists.

More about the influence of Conan Doyle's medical background on his fiction ('more' in addition to this previously linked item).

German mystics, cigarettes, watermelon sugar, etc.

Anna Mahler: True art reflects 'the true essential reality - in the language of the medieval German Mystics - the Ground of all Being.' (1962)

Mike Wallace interviewing Bennett Cerf in 1957: 'Bennett, I shall confront you with the charge that book publishers are wantonly exposing young readers to obscene trash. My name is Mike Wallace, the cigarette is Philip Morris. ... today's Philip Morris has what I call a man's kind of mildness.'

John Madera has a blog post in which many authors list their favourite novellas. Certain titles and names recur in these lists, esp. that of Richard Brautigan. Sarah Hall wrote a note on Brautigan last June. All this has convinced me to read something by Brautigan. I've ordered a collection of three of his stories and will probably begin with In Watermelon Sugar.

A lengthy piece on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's doctoral work gave him expert knowledge of 'neurosyphilis', knowledge which influenced at least three of his stories.

Another list of New Wave tunes. I guess the New Wave bands from my own humble shire (Canada) didn't get much exposure elsewhere, since none of them make this list. I made a short list of them several days ago.

This is not New Wave but I really like it:

Globe & Mail 2009 book lists

The Globe & Mail (Toronto) lists the top 20 Canadian fiction titles of 2009 (they should have specified that these are the top English-Canadian titles). It has also just released its top 100 list for the year. Here's their list of foreign (that is, un-Canadian) fiction.

Potpourri (Nov. 12)

Photo of the Vienna International Chamber of Commerce Convention (1953) -- from the Life.com archive.

"Something [Coetzee] does not yet seem to have found a way to joke about is the cold class and money exclusions of the Southern Suburbanites of Cape Town. One gathers that even Australians seem warm and friendly after them." From a review of Summertime, the Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg, South Africa)

"London, more interested in Mesopotamian oil than rewarding its erstwhile allies, responded with brute force: 2,200 British troops and 9,000 natives died in the ensuing bloodbath." From a review of The Arabs: a history in The Scotsman

Six greatest fantasy books selected by Lev Grossman

Whither withering Detroit? "The fact that Urban Farming moved to Detroit is exactly the effect I’m talking about. To anyone with aspirations in this area, it is Detroit that offers the greatest opportunity to make your mark. It is the ultimate blank canvas."

"In Germany romanticism did not stay within the boundaries of art and philosophy, it gave momentum to political nationalism, to an irrational Lebensphilosophie and to a fatal departure from the path of the Enlightenment. All this, as Safranski narrates in detail, added to the ideological powder-keg that eventually exploded in Hitler’s Germany."

"Intellectual voyeurism is alive and well, especially when it is permitted to intrude into the private life of a classically repressed personality like Max Weber. Joachim Radkau’s biography accomplishes the task of scholarly snooping well, and will satisfy even the most prurient curiosity."

"Anyway, my friends reminded me, writing for a porno mag is an important American literary rite of passage...." (ht Books, Inq.)

Yankee physician in Toronto defends Canadian healthcare in an Alabama paper.

Martha Nussbaum interviewed on Aussie radio about Stoics and Epicureans.

Bits & pieces

Lawrence Welk introduced us to many wunnerful tunes, including this stirring rendition of 'One toke over the line' by Gail & Dale (that's Dick Dale), originally by Brewer and Shipley. (I missed this when it was linked on Boing Boing in '08.)

Loads o' book lists.

I like digging up neglected, good books, and two more lists of them have appeared.

"Anyway. What? Yes. Anyway. One study says that e-mail is more corrosive to your I.Q. than pot."

Vanished Persian army found.

That von Hofmannsthal was oh! so precious.

Video of London in 1927. (ht Crooked Timber)

In preparation for Remembrance Day, explore WWI poetry. (ht Books, Inq.)

Update (Nov. 10): A paper charging Bernard Malamud with plagiarism. (ht Legal Theory Blog)

Potpourri

This is not a post about Schopenhauer -- well, it's only a bit about Schopy. I just love the photos of him. He always looks like he's on the verge of hurling a string of obscenities.

I've fixed up some old posts, esp. the ones on Vienna, mainly by replacing or deleting broken links. I've also added these blog scans in the right margin. What a neat tool!

Here are a few interesting web catches of late:

A tribute site for 20th-Century neo-Platonist stalwart, J. N. Findlay;

Marco Roth on (and against) the rise of the neuro-novel;

Pierce & Bekoff on something like morality in beasts;

An interview with Amartya Sen;

A review of a translation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's book (I had to copy & paste that name);
Top ten ghostwritten books;

An old Guardian list of best authors (they shouldn't have believed the hype -- or maybe it's we who shouldn't);

A 1917 German propaganda film about a U-boat mission -- they sink ships, always evacuating the crews first, and take five British captains as POW's; shortly after the 30-minute mark: "Filming interrupted by the appearance of an English destroyer";

Wow! Olivia Newton John is Max Born's granddaughter (Born was a Nobel laureate);

Interesting new activity -- reading police blogs, some with disturbing titles, some quite thoughtful and into theory, some about life on the job, some about life on and off the job, some that had to be shut down due to pressure from on high, etc. etc.